In the annals of very real films that sound like they should be 30 Rock jokes, a feature-length documentary on the life of mega-producer and multi-platinum…
There are no shortage of hagiographies about Saturday Night Live (nee, Saturday Night), which is currently celebrating its 50th season on NBC, including countless books — most famously James…
In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola briefly made dramatizing the works of young adult author S.E. Hinton his entire personality. Licking his wounds in the aftermath…
Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) The Last Showgirl announces its intentions and approach from its first frame. We open on a tight shot of the film’s…
Two British women, one affluent and childless, the other impoverished and seven months pregnant with a brood already at home, reconnect after decades, having once…
Both a post-#MeToo reckoning and a speculative account of the sort of behavior that could have transpired on billionaire Jeffrey Epstien’s island, Blink Twice —…
Advanced mathematics on film is often treated as a gateway to mental illness (Pi) or espionage (The Imitation Game) or in some instances both (A…
Playing like a perverse continuation of the final scene of Tár, the new video game-to-feature-film adaptation Borderlands finds Cate Blanchett slumming it as a neon-redheaded, pistol-packing,…
Familiarity abounds in The Instigators, but something in the formula feels off. Inauspiciously being released on Apple TV+ after a mostly perfunctory, one-week theatrical release, the…
With little of the fanfare or cult of personality that has greeted the Peeles, Eggers, and Asters of the world, filmmaker Oz Perkins (I Am…
Confusing glibness for frothy irreverence, Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon primarily caters to two long-underserved segments of the audience: those yearning for the reemergence…
Primarily set in a single, sparsely-dressed location and embracing archness and theatricality, Niclas Larsson’s Mother, Couch could be mistaken for being based on a stage play. The…
In 2019, the documentary filmmaker Penny Lane donated one of her kidneys as part of an altruistic donor program, meaning the organ would be given…
A cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris that’s essentially been lost to time — thus negating its effectiveness as said cautionary tale — Dick Powell’s 1956…
Spare a thought for the enfant terrible who finds themselves just this side of respectable. The filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has, over the past 15 years,…
Playing exactly how one expects a film inspired by a book of photography might, Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is a series of striking images of a nascent…
When Russia invaded Ukraine in the winter of 2022, it was widely observed how accepting bordering nations were of millions of displaced Ukrainians fleeing the…
A French drama exploring a complicated, ultimately toxic marriage told from the perspective of a desperate wife and mother, Valérie Donzelli’s Just the Two of…
An angry young girl runs away, leaving behind an affluent but troubled home life to throw in her lot with unsupervised older teenagers and low-level…
With obituaries for theatrical filmgoing being filed on an almost weekly basis, it’s worthwhile to recall that we’re but six years removed from a phenomenon…